IamA programmer who has crowd-sourced a melody, note by note, from 67,000 participants AMA!

My short bio:

Hi Reddit, I am Brendon, a self-employed (digital nomad) programmer. Over the past 12 months, I ran an experiment which attempted to automatically write a melody, based on the votes of anonymous internet visitors (mostly Redditors).

Starting from 2 given notes, the voter was asked which sequence sounded best, when an extra pitch was added to the end of the sequence:

[Note 1] [Note 2] [A/B/C/D/E/F/G] <- Which sequence sounds best?

The winning vote generated a new note and the crowd then voted on a longer sequence:

This process continued until the sequence became the length of an entire melody.

My theory was that if this system was extracting and expressing knowledge about what the majority enjoy listening to (at the most granular level)...the crowd should be able to generate their own song (which they also enjoy listening to). So the experiment began.

Edit: Crazy times. This is now on the front page of Reddit (totally surreal). Consequently, I am trying to keep my server alive at the same time as answering your questions - please bear with me. Thank you everybody for being so interested in this project.

The server is roughly under control now. Thank you for the gold kind stranger, whoever gave that to me. My second ever Reddit Gold!!

Well, I have been up all night (currently in Sri Lanka) but it has been worth it - I need to get a bit of sleep now. Thank you for your questions. It has been great fun discussing this project with each of you. I will continue this discussion as soon as I wake up.

Alright, I'm back again now. Really appreciate the interest from everybody. I will get through every single question in time.

In theory, the concept made sense, in practice, it was hard to know what to expect. There were quite a few surprises throughout the song. It was amazing to see some themes / patterns being repeated and the "no note" option was chosen quite regularly despite being a less interesting option for the crowd.

So, the repetition at the end was also a surprise. It was as if the crowd got itself into a loop and couldn't stop "following the crowd". However, even when I put myself in the crowds shoes and tried to work out when to break away from the pattern, it was easy to say "there should be one more note the same and then it would sound good if it changed after that".

One reason for the repetition was the fact that the chord progression (sequence) was the same throughout the whole song. If there had of been more variety in the progression, it surely would have influenced the pattern to break out.

Regardless, many songs have repetitive sections and I think that some lyrics and background elements will make the section sound a lot more interesting.

Hey man, Really cool project.. and really cool song! Actually tons of songs end very repetitively making it not that surprising to me. Think about Beatles - Hey Jude, Led Zeppelin - Kashmir.. but more importantly this piece highly resembles a canon, and definitely Pachelbel's Canon. Excellent project!

Well, I have been amazed by the power of Wikipedia for many years...then Stackoverflow came along and made it significantly easier to find answers to programming problems. Then I became addicted to Reddit and reading comments about articles actually became interesting when collated effectively.

So I realised collaboration was a powerful thing when harnessed in the right way. I wondered what else this could apply to. Something seemingly complex yet mathematical....music came to mind.

You will probably be surprised to hear that I do not have an answer for that yet.

I launched the site in half-finished state, thinking that I would test out the concept with a few hundred people and work out what to do from there. Within 24 hours it was getting thousands of visitors and New Scientist magazine were requesting a media interview.

So the legal "damage" had already been done from day 1. I didn't have the cash to talk to lawyers - so it is all up in the air right now. Lawyers or Reddit...what do you suggest? :)

Yes but now that people have already participated, I would need to seek proper legal advice before making a decision like that to ensure that there would not be an issue for those who have already voted.

Did you add the chord progression yourself after the notes were chosen by vote, or did you start off with that one chord and then people went with it?

The experiment is interesting and it would be cool if you could take the same approach and do it with different demographics of people - teenagers, listeners of classical music, metalheads, that sort of thing. Because as it sounds now it looks like your crowd enjoys cookie cutter 4 chord progression pop ballads the most.

The chord progression was pre-defined by myself before the melody began. I analysed a few popular songs but was mostly influenced by this video

A few days ago I released a new feature where you can pre-set your own song structure and then crowd-source the melody with your friends or a facebook group for example. Yes, I would be really interested in seeing what a group of professional musicians would be able to produce using this system.

I am very happy with the result. It is a mixed bag of surprises. I don't think the song is the perfect melody but I think we have something which we can work with to have a good shot at producing a nice sounding song.

I think your site got reddit-hugged... would you mind posting a mirror of the results? :) Edit: The page loaded and revealed remixes, including this one, check it out if you don't want to wait for 5 min for the page to load. Edit2: This shows the melody a little bit more clearly.

I am still open to open-sourcing the code - it is just something I have never done before (being from a Microsoft coding background). The code is written in C# but I guess that could be uploaded to GitHub.

I hope I haven't created a monster - a method for a crowd to easily get what they want ;)

It was certainly frustrating at times during the repetitive sections when there was a crossroad for the crowd to break out into something more interesting...the averages kept bringing things back to the same course though.

I have a long list of ideas which I keep throwing into an ideas list. Some of those would be great fun to work on but it's a balancing act as I need to also work on less interesting projects which pay the bills.

Regarding CrowdSound.net, I am hoping that I can build it into a music writing platform which explores different algorithms for writing music. Perhaps it could eventually use AI techniques.

What voting system did you use? Did each person have only one vote and did you take the note that got the most votes ("first past the post", FPTP)? Or were voters allowed to rank the notes, or given multiple votes?

FPTP would tend to choose things like the no-note option because it differs a lot from all the other options. That is, only a small minority might prefer no-note, yet it might have more votes than any one of the notes. However, with a different voting system that result would probably be different: people could register the fact that they'd rather have some note than no note.

Though I learnt a bit of piano and guitar when I was young, I haven't really been into music much for a long time. My background is more programming than music - though I did remember most of the theory concepts.

Many years ago, my friends used to talk about Cakewalk and that is the only music software I actually know the name of - is that still popular these days?

Writing music with professional software like Cakewalk was something that I always really wanted to get but I never found the time for it unfortunately. Perhaps that fact was a subconscious influence on this project :)

Really interesting experiment, thanks for having an AMA. You mentioned that you are a digital nomad. How did you become one? How often do you move? What places do you visit? What was surprising about the lifestyle?

Thank you. Yeah, I already had about 15 years experience as a programmer. I lost all my savings in the financial crisis (2008) and I couldn't stand the thought of going back to an office again. I decided that I would rather scrape cash together near an exotic beach rather than spend years saving for a mortgage.

Then I started getting some small project work through freelancer.com to pay the bills. From there I started working on ideas which would bring in more sustainable income.

I like to stay in a place between 3 and 6 months at a time so that you are more than just a tourist and you start to really understand the culture etc.

I guess it surprised me that wherever you go in the world, it doesn't take long become you are comfortable with your new surroundings. An obscure culture becomes familiar quickly.

Yes, I would like to do a song in a minor key next. Also, there are a few different things I could look at refining after learning a few things from this first song.

This week I actually launched a feature where anyone can crowd-source their own song - with this you can pre-define the sections, length, chords etc. and then get your friends or the public to crowd-source a part of it.

So it looks like, as I feel like I kind of expected, pentatonic patterns emerged the most often, with the B/F seemingly making far less frequent appearances than other notes.

Was the conclusion intended to be the length it was, or was that chosen by the crowd too? If it was already written to be that long, I feel that that might be a large part of why it became so repetitive.

Yeah - the conclusion structure was designed by me - a musical amateur :) The wisdom of the crowd would have done a better job I think.

My idea was to create a song length which was equal to the average pop song. Rather than specifying a coda, pre-chorus etc. I thought I would leave it fairly flexible to see what the crowd would come up with. My hope was that there would be more prior themes in the verse reproduced etc. but the crowd seemed to have that one descending theme locked into its hive-mind. Kind of similar to how Reddit can't shake its memes haha

As this Ama is currently on the front page of Reddit, the lyrics project is receiving a huge amount of votes (so many that I am trying to prevent my server from crashing).

As there is such a high volume of users, many were incorrectly reporting that the word "for" was invalid. I can flag words as a "false negative" and have done so now, so that word is now applicable once again.

No. I have thought about this inevitable scenario and have measures in place to prevent any shenanigans. They have already mentioned crowdsound.net a few times and talked about having a go at attacking it.

It would be difficult to string together notes like that as they are all premised on the previous sequenced.

Similarly, however, I thought it would be incredible to allow participants to branch the melody at any point they dislike. This would immediately present to them the most voted for pattern in the new direction.

This concept would probably require a much larger amount of participants - however, it is something I would love to implement.

The crowd effectively had the power to choose the gaps between notes. It will be left up to the artist to choose the combination of ties / rests which a gap comprises.